


That Which Remains

by RicketyBones



Category: Minecraft (Video Game), Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Gods & Goddesses, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, Fluff and Angst, Happy Ending, Immortality, M/M, One Shot, Prison, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-12
Updated: 2021-02-12
Packaged: 2021-03-12 05:14:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,588
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29379780
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RicketyBones/pseuds/RicketyBones
Summary: Perhaps, one day, Dream and George will be forgotten. The pickaxes will be exhibited, rotting oak making for artefacts only interesting to the keenest of historians. Children and adults alike won’t even bat an eyelid. Save for a man, fashionably outdated, who will pause momentarily and shiver. Though he will not be able to place why.(SMP AU in which Dream becomes a God and, after promising to bring him along, leaves George behind.)
Relationships: Clay | Dream/GeorgeNotFound (Video Blogging RPF), Karl Jacobs/Sapnap, Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 46





	That Which Remains

**Author's Note:**

> For context, written after the first block of the prison was broken (actually written after Sapnap’s visit, but that’s irrelevant to this story).  
> Possible content warning below with minor spoilers (hardly):  
> I have marked this as ‘Creator Chose Not to Use Archive Warnings’ as the concept of death is temporary, as mentioned in the tags. Other than this, no archive warnings would apply.

A chest. Two wooden pickaxes. What might have been.

The oldest relics of society, newly discovered, are nothing special. Simple tools from simpler times, when it had just been the two of them. Even now, with one cast aside and the other locked away, everybody remembers the founders of their world. Though, they are different beings to who they once were. The mortal and the god, switched.

Perhaps, one day, Dream and George will be forgotten. The pickaxes will be exhibited, rotting oak making for artefacts only interesting to the keenest of historians. Children and adults alike won’t even bat an eyelid. Save for a man, fashionably outdated, who will pause momentarily and shiver. Though he will not be able to place why.

Further along, a crowd will gather. They will stand around the cage, eager eyes on the being inside. Fingers will prod on the tank, but the figure is no goldfish. He won’t scowl, arrhythmic tapping instead reminding him of a time of unbearable heat. A time when blisters formed on the casing of a broken mind. A time when he still had hope. Daytime, nighttime, one the same.

 _Do not touch the glass_. A futile sign.

There won’t be another. No plaque detailing achievement nor terror. Not even a name will survive.

 _Do not poke the beast_ , it may have said, once upon a time.

For perhaps the first time since the pickaxes hacked at stone, the creature inside will be a man. At least, the shell of one. Never again a beast, never again a god, never again remembered. Not even the lost traveller, once he makes his way deeper into the exhibit, will know who he is. After all, the worst of memories are the first to disperse.

The exhibit will show no more than a flicker of recognition. He learned indifference from the best, many moons ago. From the one nobody rarely spoken of, even in his prime. The one who cared for very little, neither position nor possession. The one who grabbed at nothing but was offered everything. The man cast aside.

Upon seeing the traveller, however, the prize pig will be transported back to a better time. Before he was locked away and visitors spoke in hushed whispers of seeing a man so reduced to so little, yet so devoid of care. Before the man stood before him started losing his past. Before, when it was just himself and George.

George.

Where few things will survive the test of time, the exhibit’s memory of George will never fade. His face could still be perfectly formed in the mind, down to the freckle. Even as the god, the beast, became more of a man and grew to know nothing of himself, he retained everything of George. A testament to his love, to their loss.

Now, as Dream is locked within the walls of his own creation, the pickaxes are looked upon with distaste and pity. They argue whether Dream’s should be destroyed, giving him taste of his own medicine, but settle on keeping them in their chest. If Dream hates worldly attachments, the world needs as many as possible. Besides, George has nothing. If he ever appears again, he should be entitled to memories of his past.

But George is around, living on the side lines. Watching from the trees as Phil scoops up the chest and carries them far away. Nobody sees George, nobody ever does. He had always been second to Dream and first to be overlooked. How did he, destined to always be a right-hand man or a vice president, ever get a taste of kingship? Possessing the love of a god had won him a silver spoon and he had been served power so barely tangible before his crown had been removed on a platter.

Even in his few moments of rule, George had had his taste of blood. His own blood, as a sword had been plunged through his chest. By some miracle, or divine intervention – he suspects the latter, for obvious reasons – he had survived.

-

“Please,” Dream’s sobs echoed around the throne room, “Don’t take him away from me.”

George, even in a state of slipping between consciousness, found mental discomfort in hearing Dream beg. Emotion so raw was usually saved for their most intimate of moments. Never in front of a crowd, never over death. Dream had built a wall around himself many years ago but had remembered to throw over a knotted bedsheet for George to climb. Their fairy tale romance in a world so desensitised to evil.

He wondered what the last words he had said to Dream were. They were so insignificant. Was this how he would be remembered? Never even given the chance to say goodbye to the man he loved. The one who gave him the world, opening his heart enough for two.

The room fell silent for a while and George became a blank slate. Pain still spread throughout the room, throughout his body, but he was unaware of it. For a moment, he was no longer George. He became a shell, but the shell quickly grew cold with no inhabitant.

Lifeless, slipping away, until he wasn’t. A hermit crab tried him on for size and he was thrown back. No longer wholly George, but it was enough.

“Dream.” His voice came out weak, but it was his own. Mostly.

As his eyes fluttered open, they met a face. The face of a lover filled with pain. His lover, but not his pain. Nothing could hurt George. There was no wound on his chest, just a void in his soul.

Not pain, hunger. George took a moment to realise what the expression on Dream’s face truly was. He wore not the face of a man who had pleaded for his life, but the one of a bargain. A soul for a life, a soul for power.

“George!” There were tears in Dream’s eyes and they splattered onto his own porcelain cheeks. Old tears, from before. Dream smiled an empty smile and wiped them off his face with a calloused thumb. The touch gentler that he’d experienced since the outbreak of war. In another world, it would have been a touch of sacrifice and of mercy. The more it could mean, the less it meant to either of them.

George pulled himself into a sitting position, with help from Dream. His eyes darted to the others around him. Each face held a different expression. Someone was crying, someone was smiling, someone was staring at his lover in fear.

“What happened?” he asked.

Dream shushed him gently. Nobody else spoke. He was not to know. George decided that he may have found this unfair once. He should have been of liberty to know why he no longer felt a thing, why his lover held only a shard of his former emotions, but that very lack of feeling had blockaded his care.

-

George next appears in the Arctic. He doesn’t know how he got there. Through the trees, watching them morph as the seasons change. They grew sparse as he had neared the wasteland until he was left as he is not, uncovered and unprotected.

He finds himself staring at Ranboo’s cabin. It reminds him of his own from not too long ago, destroyed by the very boy whose house he was before. In another life, as another George, he might have made him pay the price, burning it down just as he had to Ponk’s lemon tree. He would probably wind up chained to the walls of a cell alongside a lover which may have still been his. But in this life of vacuity and loneliness, he stays rooted to the floor.

After a few hours, Phil finds him. Questions him. How long has he been standing there? Why has he not suffered frostbite? What does he want? George does not know, so Phil hurries him inside.

The smell of mushroom soup permeates the air with familiarity, sourced from a cauldron in the corner of the kitchen. Food from the forest whose roots run alongside his own veins. Before he knows it, he is getting pushed onto a polished spruce chair and Phil is ladling the streaming liquid into a hand carved bowl. It’s placed in front of him and he takes a sip. The earthy silk coats his tongue, and he remembers last drinking it the house on the lake, huddled under blankets, sitting around the fireplace. He had never been a good cook himself, but Dream had proven himself in the kitchen time and time again.

Phil disappears while he drinks and returns shortly after he finishes with a chest. He rests it down upon the table, expectantly waiting for it to open. George does not move for he knows what lays before him.

“You can have them if you want,” Phil tells George, placing a hand on his shoulder. George does not react at the touch, instead stares at the closed chest with hollow intensity.

Phil was the one who found the pickaxes, so he is entrusted as their keeper. If George does not want them, it had been decided, they would be memorialised.

“What do you say?” Phil pushes at the wooden man.

George shrugs. He does this a lot these days, ever since he’d lost a piece of himself in that throne room. He absently wonders if Dream does the same.

“I’ll just lose them,” he says, turning his head towards Phil and meeting his eyes.

He receives a slight nod of understanding. “Very well,” Phil says.

Before Dream had ever had issue with worldly attachment, George had already been without all traces of sentimentality that he once held. George’s hunger for nothing had stood before Dream’s hunger for everything and wrapped the world in a heartless embrace. It had taken George months to notice, but in that moment, Dream had realised in order to possess everything, nobody else could have a single thing. George had always been his muse.

George does not dwell on the thought. Instead, he bids Phil farewell and fades away into the snow-covered trees.

-

“I wonder what kind of legacy we will leave,” Dream had been asked one day. They had been sat in a field of flowers, in a time when Dream still had a name and George has still been his.

Dream smiled softly as he picked a dandelion from the dewy lawn. He passed it to George, who accepted, placing it between two pages of the poetry book in his hands. Before he drew the frail pages together around the flower, Dream caught a glance of the words on the page.

_Behind Me – dips Eternity –_

_Before Me – Immortality –_

Dream leaned in and placed a delicate kiss on George’s lips.

_Myself – the Term between_

He pulled away and saw the pink flowers of a blush rise and blossom on George’s cheeks. His cheeks. Dream leaned back and surveyed the man staring so deeply into his eyes. His eyes trailed beyond, looking at the extensive fertile land around him. Untouched. All of it was to build and to do whatever their shared hearts desired.

“We’ll be immortalised for our greatness,” Dream said after bringing his eyes back to his lover. He brought a hand up to George’s cheek and traced his freckles like constellations.

“Both of us?” George whispered, closing his eyes, melting into the touch.

Dream delicately drew George’s face back against his own and brushed their lips together. “Yes,” he said, smiling against the kiss. “Forever.”

Instead of deepening the connection, it was George who pulled away first. Distrustful in love, it was not unusual for him to do. Dream pouted for the one with the key to his heart, but George turned his face away, pinks and oranges of the looming sunset illuminating him.

“I’ll make you my king,” Dream promised, words so palpable a crown could have fallen from the sky.

George smiled but did not turn back to his heart. “And what will that make you, Dream?”

Dream did not tear his eyes away, instead drew inspiration from the masterpiece before him, never a Monet. He absorbed the cosmos and replied, “I’ll be a god.”

-

George finds book in the library one day, scent of the past infused in its spine. Dust and dew. As if from memory, it falls open in his hands. The yellow flower appears, still pressed between its pages. He doesn’t smile like he once did, but he does think. The memory of that day isn’t his, imposing on his mind from a greater source. He doesn’t dwell on moments of happiness, but he knows who has all the time in the world to.

He takes the book, flower and all, and finds his way to Sapnap. He doesn’t remember the journey, melting through the forest as he always does, but he reaches Sapnap eventually. He is sitting in Karl’s house, alone, and biting anxiously at the skin around his fingers. Years of drawing bows in wars he never fully understood had left them with cracks and callouses.

“Hi,” George mumbles from the doorway.

Sapnap violently jolts as if George’s silhouette has just materialised out of thing air. When his eyes come to adjust on the backlit man, his face drops. “Oh, it’s you.” The words are twinged with disappointment, but not at George. At who he is not.

George doesn’t take it to heart.

Instead, he floats into the room, not waiting for an invitation, and sits himself down across from his old friend. Sapnap had known Dream for almost as long as he had, and he was the one that had truly suffered a loss at his fall from grace. He had witnessed the pride that came before in a way George had never been around to absorb.

George pulls out the book from his jacket and flips open to the page with the flower slotted inside. Sapnap looks down his nose at it, then back up at George. He doesn’t know where the flower is from, but George is sure he knows what it means.

“Maybe I should visit him,” George says.

Sapnap scoffs. “Dream doesn’t care about you.”

George shrugs, folding the pages back together. It’s not true, they both know it. Dream had tried to only care about power, even going as far as using George as a means to reach it. The intrusion of memories in George’s mind that he had not held onto spoke a thousand words. Dream has nothing else to do but to think of George, day in day out. George even thinks Dream still has it in him to one day save a smile for Sapnap.

Dissatisfaction spreading across his face, Sapnap continues, “Dream said he doesn’t care about anything. That means he doesn’t care about us.”

George decides now is probably not the time to bring up the fact he’s not sure if he cares, either. After surviving a sword to the chest, he had just deteriorated further. The parts of him that remain are rotting, lifeless. Any longer in the forest and his skin may turn to bark and his arms to branches. Moss might grow and he may join the trees in an eternal slumber he so often melts into.

“Do you remember when you last saw him?” Sapnap pushes.

George remembers. The day he lost his crown. “I didn’t care about being king,” he says, deadpan, in form of an answer.

Dream had been cruel, but in the way love is cruel when it’s tainted with unaffectionate devotion. George hadn’t cared, he still didn’t. Maybe, he thinks, Dream had had a plan for the pair of them. Something greater than a kingship. But George hadn’t stayed to find out, instead seeking power in his own right.

“I know that, but that’s not the whole truth, is it?” Sapnap leans forward, narrowing his eyes. “Something happened that day in the throne room.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” George replies. It’s partly true. He doesn’t know for sure, but he’s had enough time to work it out.

“Bullshit!” he spits with the fire that had long been manifesting inside of him. “He brought you back! Why would he do that, just to push you away?”

George shrugs again.

“Don’t give me that,” he warns, dangerous look in his eye.

“He became a God,” George whispers, truthfully. Just as he had promised he would.

Sapnap leans back and takes a moment to consider. For the severity of what George is saying, it doesn’t take him long before the anger wears off his face. The truth, rarely palatable, is easily absorbed.

“And what about you?” Sapnap asks after another moment. The anger has been replaced with a look of sorrow, of loss. “What happened to you? I didn’t just lose one friend that day.”

Betrayal. Dream had betrayed the promise he had once made to George and they both had betrayed Sapnap.

“I am what he is to become,” George replies, cryptically.

Where Sapnap has a presence and a soul, he has neither. It isn’t that George is small or easily manipulated. Far from it – his detachment gives him his own power. Not one of true authority, but one that operates on whims.

Sapnap rolls his eyes as if he isn’t well acquainted with theatrics. “And what is that?”

“The same, but without power.” _A shell_.

-

They were standing outside the castle. The grounds barely held onto the echo of two men sharing kisses amongst the flowers. It was earlier than it had been that day, blues replaced pinks, sorrow replaced truth. Loyalty remained, though neither knew it, bent beyond recognition.

“George, I think, you probably shouldn’t be the king anymore.”

Dream’s voice chilled all those who heard it. Many did – they rarely did a thing without an audience anymore. Not George, though. All he heard was a faint hiss of a promise dissolved. Though the world had been designed with them both in mind, it was only one who could prosper in the quest for domination.

George looked at him blankly, “You don’t want me to be king?”

Bluebeard married only to kill at the slightest sign of disobedience.

“Well, I mean, it’d be safer if you weren’t, right?” Dream asked. Not a question, a thinly veiled attempt at manipulation. It might have worked, too – in fact, George was certain it would have – had he been anyone else.

George scoffed, unwilling to let Dream off easily. “It sounds like you’re sugar coating it,” he spat, matching Dream’s chill.

George thought of his assassination and how Dream had bargained for his life and, in doing so, how they had both lost pieces of themselves that day. Those missing pieces had made room for power, but at what cost? By removing George’s crown, Dream strengthened them both, but doomed them to go their separate ways.

“Maybe a little,” Dream said simply, corners of his lips curled into a smile.

It was clear to George how meticulously planned this had been. No matter how hard Dream tried to change, George still knew him like the back of his hand. A very public split to amass sympathy for both parties. Something they could both come out stronger from. Or not.

“George,” Sapnap asserted, manoeuvring his body towards his friend and his bow towards his brother, “Do you remember what Dream said to Tommy?”

George did, but he didn’t let it show on his face. Instead, he watched the fall of Rome itself as Sapnap walked towards him. Instead, he smiled. Not for his small victory, nor his grand loss, but for the omnipotent being that stood before him. The smile whispered to Dream, _you don’t win this one_. There was space for two gods in this world.

Dream’s face flicked with understanding, but it was missed by Sapnap, who pressed, “I’ll refresh your memory, George. Dream said he didn’t care about anything in this world.”

“I care about George,” Dream stood his ground. Once upon a time it had been loving statement, now possessive was all it was.

Sapnap’s face fell. The façade of the hunter, stone-cold and violent, was no more as hurt crawled from between his lips and settled within his eyes. He raised his bow enough for increased accuracy.

George turned to him and warned, “Don’t poke the beast.” He imagined Dream was no longer susceptible to Death’s unrelenting grip. Sapnap never missed and he didn’t want to see the consequence of it.

“People don’t like me, so they don’t like you by association,” Dream continued. Blood coated his words as he painted their reputations. The soulless god and the discarded king. One feared, one pitied. In throwing away George, Dream was establishing himself for ultimate power.

George looked him up and down. Looked at the man he had loved, the man that had truly loved him. Perhaps he still did. “We could have been great.” _Whole, together_.

Dream sneered.

George brought a hand up to the gold that perched on his head. His fingers wrapped around the cool metal and in one swift movement he sent it tumbling down. “Just say you hate me.” The clang of metal against cobble and icy words reverberated in the ears of those unfortunate to bear witness.

And with that, he left, not waiting around to hear the answer. He knew it wasn’t true, George still had his own chambers in the castle of Dream’s mind, even if he no longer held the key. Dream did not want to be seen as possessing the very weakness that he was profiting from and George refused to be a pawn. Somewhere, deep inside, Dream still loved George, but George no longer held the power to reciprocate it.

George wandered until he hit a forest. An impenetrable fortress of spruce warned him away. One more step and he would be trapped in inexistence, forever fated to fade like seasons. There was a rush of warmth that tickled his neck, but his breath materialised before his eyes and the trees did not stir. Everywhere, nowhere, all at once.

The trees enclosed around him and, for the first time, he disappeared into a sleep of obscurity.

-

They are interrupted by the arrival of Karl. His face is hollow, and he stares blankly at Sapnap for a moment before recognition kicks in. Sapnap lurches towards the door as he had for George, but this time hope comes into fruition. The two hold each other in a tight embrace, an echo of the past.

Eventually Sapnap guides them both over to where George is sitting. The man doesn’t act upon any ounce of recognition he may experience, instead blindly trailing his eyes across George’s face. Up close, George can see himself in Karl. Jumping between times or fading within one, both of them have ended up lesser versions of what they had once been. Karl still has Sapnap, but George remains alone.

Karl looks down at the book in George’s withered hands and George swears his eyes gloss over for a second. When he comes to, it’s almost as if he’s had an epiphany. Recognition of a friend and of something else.

“You need to visit him,” Karl says to George suddenly.

Sapnap furrows his brows, “How’d you –”

Karl waves a weak hand and cuts him off. “He’ll never get out.”

“He deserves to be in there.” George replies, parrot fashion. Even someone as deserving of sympathy as George cannot get far without denouncing Dream. That’s what it had all been about, their division. Neither could flourish as long as they held the other in mind.

“Do you truly believe that?” Karl asks genuinely. A voice weary from travel further condensed in a whisper.

“I do!” Sapnap interjects, but it does not matter.

George’s own answer comes in the form of impulsive action. He stuffs the poetry book back into his jacket and swiftly brings himself to his feet, despite protests from Sapnap. On his way out of the door, he steals a diamond pickaxe. It’s been a while since his hands have grazed an oak handle and he’s almost sent spiralling back to those early days.

He runs. It’s exhilarating. For the first time in a while, he feels alive. He runs until he reaches Pandora’s Vault, arms heavy from the unfamiliar tool in his grasp. Adrenaline, or pure willpower, pushes him through and diamond grazes black stone.

Perhaps he will make it through. The lava inside will burn his hands, but he will feel no pain. He’ll drag Dream out while he still has life left in him. They will run far, run until they reach a new flower field. Dream will pick him a new dandelion and he’ll place it behind his ear. Yellow will reflect onto the side of his face and Dream will smile and he will laugh. It will be beautiful. It will be theirs.

Perhaps he will be caught, sentenced for his crimes, spared out of pity. George will never be an issue, they will claim. We will never see him again.

Dream will be returned to the prison. He will spend his last sane moments in pain, from the fire, from losing George. Surely, nobody could survive the warden.

One day, they will all be dead. The only one left will be the prisoner, but he might as well be gone too. No name, no legacy, no hope. New generations will take their places and he will stop being a prisoner. He will have committed no crimes under their eyes, so instead he will become their artefact. A glimpse into a past world.

They will put him in a glass box, forged from all the shards from all the promises he had left behind. Melted down, repurposed. Once again trapped within walls of his own creation.

Days will turn to nights and they will turn to days again. He will no longer have visitors, only spectators willing him to perform. But he will know of no tricks, only of how to exist.

He will see the time traveller and he will not smile. The wrong past to the wrong future.

The crowds will continue, day in, day out. Night will be his only solitude, a change from the years that solitude had been his only existance. Moonlight will spill through a glass pane, never quite angled right to lay eyes on the moon itself. Will he even remember the moon? He will shut his eyes, for mundanities like sleep still enclose around immortal life, and he will hear a distant tapping.

 _Do not poke the beast_ , a sign from a past long forgotten.

He will open his eyes and before him will stand the boy he once knew. Where he will have grown into the curio they had always desired him to be, George will have grown into the trees. Earthy fingers will rap at the casing as if willed by a gust of wind. He will raise his own filthy hand to the glass, and he will smile. They will smile, for the first time in centuries.

The oldest relics of society were once human. They predate any tools, any society, yet are regarded as nothing. Even now, as George hacks away at the black stone, he is reminded that they are not the same people who had once fallen in love. Though, it doesn’t mean they cannot love again.

A prison. Two separated lovers. What still might be.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this based on a post on my Tumblr ( @/drowninginmycornflakes) so come interact with me if you enjoyed it (or if you didn’t). It was also a procrastination attempt from a history essay. I have now written the essay and I definitely did more research for this fic.
> 
> The poem is by Emily Dickinson. I’m using the opening lines, which express how life is a temporary blip in the foreverness of non-existence (if this were an English Lit essay, I may have phrased that better, but it’s not). It’s ironic as their immortality had not yet been realised, and sad as their love is only temporary (or is it?) in their existence.
> 
> The exhibition in the future is loosely based off of The Lost City of Mizu so I thought it only fair to have Karl be the first to see Dream.


End file.
